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Lauren Bates-Rodriguez of the Sentinel Café, the increasingly popular spot inside the Cruzioworks building. Photo by Chip Scheuer

Lauren Bates-Rodriguez of the Sentinel Café, the increasingly popular spot inside the Cruzioworks building. Photo by Chip Scheuer

Lauren Bates-Rodriguez likes shopping at the farmers market to buy salad and soup ingredients for the Sentinel Café, where she’s worked for over a year. Located in the Cruzioworks building, the coffee shop also has pastries from Kelly’s Bakery, bagels from the Bagelry and coffee from Verve.

SCW: What kinds of people come by here?

LAUREN BATES-RODRIGUEZ: At least 80 percent of our customer base are regulars, and they work in the building. But we have such a range. Our tea list used to be five—a green, a white, a red, a couple black teas, a mint. Now we have probably 20 on our list, purely from customer feedback and people being able to say, “Hey, I really like this tea. Could you carry something like it?” When I first started, we just had mainly pastries, and we had the salad menu, but it wasn’t very extensive. We’ve implemented a happy hour—2pm to close, which we write on the board is 3:30-ish. Espressos are just a dollar, and cappuccinos are just two dollars.

What time is 3:30-ish?

If it’s a slow day, these walls will be closed by 3:35. If it’s a busy day, I’ve stayed open almost until 4:30. I don’t like turning away people. I don’t like saying no unless we’re sold out of something, and then I have to. If someone comes by at 4, and I’m just about to close, and all they want is an iced tea or a cappuccino, I’m happy to do it. We used to close at 2, and I found we were turning away a lot of customers.

Do people from other parts of town ever stumble on this place?

Word of mouth is what we rely on, and it’s worked really well. We sell out of things now. Before we were having to put things out for a dollar or 50 cents just to not throw it away, or I would walk out with a bag of bagels and try to hand one to people on the streets.

I miss the $1 leftover treats days.

There were a few today. And they were swiped up as soon as I put them out there! We don’t want our food to go to waste at all, and our prices are pretty darn reasonable for the fact that you’re getting a salad of fresh greens that were grown not too far away. There’s a lot of love that goes into everything here. A lot of nerdy energy, too.

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